"Mac OS X 10.5.2 Font Issues and MS Office 2004
Hi Mike, I just resolved a long running issue with my Leopard install that I wanted to share with you and our community.
I had just done a deep cache cleaning with Leopard Cache Cleaner (just to reduce disk usage since I hadn't done it in a long time) and after rebooting, experienced numerous problems in various programs that seemed to be around fonts. PDF displaying page elements in Preview, but no words (because the font was corrupt) and so on.
But the biggest indicator was MS Office 2004, upon the first run of Word, during the phase of startup when it caches font info, it reported (one at a time) hundred of fonts as corrupt.
I started up Font Book and took a look at what Word was reporting as corrupt and it turned out to be a very large font collection that I had added years ago and completely forgotten about (from MacWare).
Lots of trial and error but finally I deleted all System 9 fonts and all of the MacWare fonts and low and behold, Word and Excel are now loading fast without the delay I had gotten used to since installing Leopard of caching font upon every run of these programs.
Numerous other programs have shown dramatic improvement in start times such as iWeb, and Pages and Keynote and several weird font rendering glitches in Safari that I had just ignored were now gone.!!!!!
So I recommend that all users with a legacy installation like mine (which goes back to the Mac OS X beta and has been updated ever since) examine their fonts.
-Jim"